Belgium's Fortis Bank Selects Convera to Power Secure Section of Corporate Intranet

Vienna, VA, November 4, 2002 — Convera (Nasdaq: CNVR) today announced that Fortis Bank, part of Fortis, an international financial services provider active in the fields of insurance, banking and investment, is using Convera's RetrievalWare to more effectively search and retrieve over 400,000 multilingual documents archived in a password-protected section of the bank's corporate intranet. More than 250 employees in the bank's Belgium headquarters use RetrievalWare to search for and access up-to-the-minute financial, political and economic data culled from dozens of sources, including newspapers, internal memos, magazines and the Internet.

RetrievalWare also enables the bank's Information Services team to set up personal profiles so that news and information is delivered in a timely manner. For example, staff monitoring particular companies or aspects of the Benelux economy now are alerted via email as soon as a new document is posted that is relevant to their interests. The software delivers a list of new titles each morning that match a user's profile, with links to the full documents. Users can quickly modify or update profiles using the intranet, making the system particularly valuable.

Prior to the installation of RetrievalWare, as Fortis expanded in Europe, Asia and beyond, the sharing of information became nearly impossible given the varying network operating systems and languages used throughout the company. Even local offices in Belgium used a combination of French and Flemish. Fortis Bank believes that RetrievalWare has dramatically cut costs as staff now can retrieve multilingual financial news and documents directly from their desktops, as well as receive news relevant to their personal profiles. According to bank officials, the system has been a dramatic improvement and the results so impressive that RetrievalWare has now been rolled out to the bank's legal department.

About Fortis Bank
Fortis Bank is part of Fortis, an international financial services provider active in the fields of insurance, banking and investment. With a market capitalization of EUR 28 billion and around 67,000 employees, Fortis ranks in the top 30 of European financial institutions. It is listed on the exchanges of Amsterdam, Brussels and Luxembourg and has a sponsored ADR programme in the United States.

About Convera's RetrievalWare
RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multi-lingual search system that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets. RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.

About Convera
Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorization solutions. Convera's RetrievalWare solutions maximize return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 750 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera's search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more. For more information, contact Convera at 800-788-7758, via e-mail at info@convera.com or on the Web at www.convera.com.
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This release, including any statements from Convera personnel, contains statements about Convera's future expectations, performance, plans, and prospects, as well as assumptions about future events. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including without limitation, business and economic conditions and trends; continued success in technological advances; possible disruption in commercial activities caused by terrorist activity and armed conflict, such as changes in logistics and security arrangements; reduced customer demand relative to expectations; competitive factors; and other risk factors listed from time to time in the company's SEC reports. Actual results may differ materially from our expectations as the result of these and other important factors relating to Convera's business and product development efforts, which are further described in Convera's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings can be obtained from the SEC's website located at www.sec.gov. Any forward-looking statements are based on information available to Convera on the date of this release, and Convera assumes no obligation to update such statements. Convera Media Contact:
John Murray
703 761 3700
jmurray@convera.com